“No. Your flowers are not mine to spread upon the graveyard you built. It would be even insulting to make flowers rain upon them in your name, Terus. When you vanish, so should do the shower of petals. But when my father dies I’ll do my best to cover the lands around his cave with the most colorful of feathers. I don’t own nor can recreate your oneiric flowers, brother. But I have an entourage of birds ready to embellish any grave I deem worthy. And your dear city is… for you depicted me correctly in our book.”
—The dragoness' answer to Terus’ question.
The place where the Collies met the Bernese was hard to maneuver for those unable to fly. Dirofil, who wasn’t counted among them anymore, balanced on a single leg, over the side of a floating Border Collie. In the distance a formation loomed, magnificent and with many supporting pillars, its shape reminded to that of a chelonian’s shell. What concerned the automaton was, in addition to the bone-white color, the lack of an outline when gazed at by the Reaper’s eye. Whatever that structure was, it was either composed of non-mutated dogs, or of some inorganic material.
Dirofil browsed his memories of white dog breeds. Samoyeds where discarded. A mass of dead Cocker coral was a possibility, but he didn’t want to think about what could have killed a whole reef. Maltese remained, no doubts, annoying. Bichon Frisé, second verse same as the first. Dogos or bull terriers, he had seen them as part of the Mauling layer. Poodles… it didn’t look cushioned, angry and pompous enough. Great Pyrenees? Hopefully.
He found it weird to have such strong preferences for dog breeds, but the caprices of the creators permeated each milliliter of reality, including those occupied by his soul.
He oppressed the humid air and lashed against it to reposition himself, to get closer to this object that raptured his attention. His tail raised next to his head, ready for action, the polished segments shining on the underside, reflecting the scant stray rays that escaped from the Retriever layer, or the abundant shine that his core exuded in pulses. In the dark of the sea the only thing that shone more than him was the mysterious structure, whose underbelly bathed in the white-golden light of distant puppies.
Stealthily he bounced from collie to collie, closeness unveiling the reality of the formation before him. Of the carcass before him.
Orbits, spread over a fabric of welded skulls, all of them definitively canine, but misshapen to fit as bricks into the colossal structure. That which from afar looked like irregularities weren’t but the areas where muscles would have attached as the thing was alive—if it had ever been alive to begin with. Theirs was a world of cognition, where seeming miracles were the norm and not the exception.
It came across as macabre to Dirofil, but he knew such impression to be as wrong as it was instinctual. The macabre had intent, it had a guiding mind behind. And he knew of none that could willfully sew bones together. None except for him, that is.
If he stood before a natural formation, a proper skeleton of a colony, it couldn’t be called macabre, lest the creators had designed each aberration in detail. And if they hadn’t, because he’d rather think of the creators as imperfect and neglectful instead of perfect and outright vile, then what was the sense of pondering whether or not there was a purpose behind the aesthetic unpleasantness before him, behind the jutting canines and the conjoined nasals?
Then he wondered about one of these terms. Colony. Why had he assumed so? Many heads didn’t have to necessarily mean many individuals, not inside Cynothalassa.
Terms, he and his siblings liked to hang on the meaning of them. Words didn’t make up the world, but they helped one define it, shed light into the dark room of existence. Babesi’s excited ramblings about the tile patterns of some unusual spire she had found while exploring beyond her own, Parvov’s discourses about overcoming the end, the promises he made to Shadiran. All collections of terms. A mixed bag of lexemes. It fascinated him, the fact that he fostered such respect for something as simple as sounds or inscriptions. But Thinkers were children of a mind, and so, he could think of language as a family, too. As less developed ideas. A whole library of feeble cousins.
With a little bit of reinvented phrenology, he could also turn the mound of bones in front of him, with its legs and central body all made out of craniums, into a library. But that was a project for another lifetime, one he wouldn’t have.
If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
Propelling himself onto the upper surface of the carcass, a low dome formed from the same bones as the rest of it, Dirofil’s toes intruded orbits, fossae, foramina, and nasal openings. Not all skulls were oriented the same, and some even had the dentary integrated into the area where they had become fixed, sometimes compressed at a side, pressed against the palate, or twisted together with the bones of the snout.
Ahead, more heads underfoot. Draped in his cape, wings relaxed beneath it and creating a visible hump, Dirofil wandered about, seeking for an entrance into the mass of bones. Metal against bone resounded in a quiet sea, the hearts beating above and below, but not many in the high collie layer: most of it was clear atmosphere, with sparse floating dogs here and there. It wasn’t the kingdom of silence, but here he could appreciate a semblance of tranquility, a respite from the claustrophobia the layer above so readily peddled.
A hole, not centered but near the periphery of the skull saucer, revealed a series of trifurcating runnels. Dirofil doubled up the energy used on his psycholocation, making sure to penetrate further into the mass of bone, taking in the intricate interconnectedness of the openings of each skull before shifting into the empty spaces beyond them. The spiritual radar was no easy thing to master, but every living Thinker, excluding the Corship and his Splinters, had extensive practice with it, and Dirofil wasn’t the exception.
With a few flicks of the eye of the Reaper he checked for hidden threats inside the structure. Nothing he could see, maybe something that could kill him: the mere existence of Murkhounds suggested to him that there could be horrors even more adept at hiding, ones that not even the eye of his Reaper could detect.
The Fourth Imagined dove into the tunnels, landing on all five, and escaping from the sounds of the sea as he intruded deeper into the carcass. The labyrinthine nature of the place was both reassuring, for being hunted down them would be daunting for the hunter, and frightening, as the next turn could reveal a master of disguise only mechanical eyes could see. Yet he had to discard the latter, for cover would allow him to practice with his lungs while hiding from the eyes of the sea, and without leaving it. He would not need to expose himself to the noxious exhale of the core, to cross the densely packed Retriever layer down and then up again. Besides, what training ground could be more fitting for a worm than a cadaver?
After several minutes of crawling he reached a chamber among the skulls, where the only light was the one that bled out his heart and the only sound the clanks and whines of his joints, where he lay on a depression, carefully repositioning the base of his wings to the front of his body so he could lie down without damaging them.
Cradled among long dead bones at last, Dirofil raised a hand lazily, curled the arm in likewise fashion, and from his elbow let out a weak yodel, different from the ones he used to manifest the clones. The stillborn howl failed to solidify, a transient, liquid sound evaporating soon after coming into being. It resulted impossible to wreathe oneself with it, to do anything of substance before the spell died off. But it was a step in the right direction.
He tried cries unbecoming of his royalty, shrieks that rattled his ears and bellows that made his flesh shiver like jelly. They echoed in the cavities skin had long ago abandoned, the wide, immortal curves that could barely be called grins mocking his every failure. But in front of this frozen public he had to perform, say lines written before the world existed, ones he had never read. The world, devoid of stages as it had always been, demanded a play, and Dirofil suspected the genre was tragedy.
Opisthotonus rings as the wrong word to describe a Thinker, yet the position Dirofil had adopted as he, wide eyed, played with the lung, could be called analog to that of a tetanus patient.
None chanted for his performance to go on, but the absence of cheers didn’t make the lugubrious audience any less of a worthy public.
Little clones that skittered over his skin like spiders before sputtering off of existence, useless, but denoting progress. Progress! Addicting and electrifying, rousing his voicebox and causing him to giggle whilst his lungs screamed. Covered in slick sound, like a creature emerging from a repugnant cocoon, for days on end the Fourth Imagined spent his every waking moment screeching, each cry a bit different, each howl unique, the only aim to ever approach asymptotic perfection.
Tides came, tides went. The Corship’s autumnal surface turned into a painting of night under Lyssav’s influence. Doratev and Babesi perfected the eyes of Project Seloma, and Morbilliv wore three of them, leaving Parvov’s stashed safely by the Corship’s heart.
Tides came, tides went, and after more than a dozen and a half passed, the nematode molted, peeling off layer of sound after layer of sound as he made his way out the titanic carcass he had invaded what felt like eons ago to him. The armor had been perfected, slippery and resistant just as he liked it, and easy to shed in case something managed to get a hold of him in spite of the aforementioned qualities. He made his way upwards calmly, feeling safe inside of his technique. The fragments of armors past flaked off and disintegrated into notes, emerging from their demise a symphony of delicate tunes. After a short crawl Dirofil reached the exit and extended his wings, greeting the expanse of the ocean of dogs. To see living pooches drifting by filled him with a sense of wonder; the slightly lessened darkness felt like the light of the Edge to eyes that had become used to the nigh-absolute gloom inside the cadaver as he tried to conserve the energy of his core.
Taking air, all that remained now was to test his new armor. And there was a whole layer waiting for him to defy its countless jaws.